Zing! That word encapsulates the RX-7. The only vocabulary the little coffee-can rotary had was zing! (snick) zing! (snick) and zing again! Sooner rather than later, it zinged you for a couple of Gs when its rotor seals gave up the zing! But that didn’t come as a surprise, and it never zinged you for anything else. That is, unless you got a little too frisky in certain corners, and the live rear axle might toss you a nasty little over-zing. As long as you could live on a torque-free diet, the RX-7 was one of the best friends an enthusiast driver could hope for in its day. And there are still loyal devotees of Zing-Buddhism today.

Cars like the gen1 RX-7 appear as magic. Who could imagine that a bunch of Mazda sedan parts artfully rearranged within the tenets of minimalism could have such a profound affect? Just when all hope for the rapidly bloating Datsun Z was gone, along comes the same formula, but even better. Well, different, anyway; and certainly more fun in the go-cartish way. The RX-7 and VW GTI were the two boons in an era where cheap thrills weren’t always.

The GTI was certainly the more practical of the two, and not just for the back seat. Its torquey long-stroke four was never caught flat-footed. The little Mazda rotary was always asleep below about 3500 rpm, and really only perked up for the last heady rush to 7,000 rpm. Not the thing for long commutes with the A/C on in LA’s rush hours. But a good friend did that for well over a decade with a white RX-7 like this one. Except for the inevitable rotor seal rebuild, it never gave him any real problems, and he had bought it used. This one still looks mighty solid too.

With all of 100 hp on tap if you kept it singing soprano, one’s downshifting algorithms had to be reprogrammed. The transition from a Detroit V8 was brutal, if not almost dangerous. Below the happy range, absolutely nothing happened. It would have worn on me for the long haul, but then I do savor a dollop of torque with my horse meat.

I’m not fully versed in the origins of the RX-7, but it’s pretty obvious that if Mazda’s rotary was going to keep zinging, it needed a new home. The line of rotary sedans and coupes had reached the end of the line, with the RX-4 being terminated in 1978. Efficiency had improved somewhat over the earlier RX-2 and RX-3, but just couldn’t be competitive with tightening CAFE and increasing gas prices. The new 1979 626 was strictly piston powered.

Guesswork tell me that the RX-7 shared some/most of the new 626 underpinnings, like the four-link rear axle, which gave the sedan and coupe the inevitable “poor man’s BMW” moniker. And given that the RX-7 didn’t even have rack and pinion steering, my guess about parts sharing is probably pretty safe. But the featherweight rotary tucked down low and back in the RX-7 compartment resulted in a perfect 50-50 weight distribution. And the overall weight of around 2400 lbs made all the more tossable. The Mazda parts department salad was tasty, and a hit. Almost a half-million came off the lines in Hiroshima; something its less delectable successor could only dream of.

Of course there was the GSL-SE, with the bigger fuel injected 13B engine that packed 135 horses. Never drove one, but everyone raved about what a difference it made, and how it finally made the RX-7 truly whole. It came along late in the game, but that’s the one to look for. Unless you really love zinging.

A buddy of mine bought a well-used 1st-gen RX7 in about 1993. We had a ball in that car. Brings a smile to my face just to think of it now. 20 years erases a lot of less than stellar memories but I don’t remember any less-than-GO performance anywhere on the RPM curve.

I remember in about 1987, during my car selling days, we had a 1984 on the VW lot that was both a repo and an “Easter Bunny”. This is prairie speak for an Ontario or Quebec (read salty) car. The disgruntled former owner had apparently ripped out the fuel door button, it took us forever to find out how to put gas in it. I was demoing it to a prospect out on the highway one evening and punched it to demonstrate the “zing”. Right at 7000 or so, an oil cooler lets go, and a storm of smoke erupts from under the hood. Limp to service station, call for tow. No, he didn’t buy it.

When demonstrating my 1964 Corvair convertible to an English grad student (he was English, not studying the language), the right rear wheel chose to depart. Bearing failure. Only doing about 5 mph so there were no deaths. Guess what? No sale!

I owned an RX3 wagon. At least I recall it being a 3. I can totally agree with everything you say about it’s traffic manners. That’s why a swap became popular. In this area (north of Houston) I have seen them with sbc and sbf. Of the ones that I saw the most sanitary was one particular ford install with a 302. I have never driven it but sure looked and sounded good.

In Guam, I seem to recall a swap for a piston engine in both the RX7 and the rotary pickup. Sure would remove the zing but different strokes for different folks.

Great cars. Their design has aged nicely, especially considering this was a car of the 70s. They may have been revvers, but the sounds from and feel of those sewing machine smooth rotaries were simply unmatched.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in an RX7, so in the current world of SUVs I wonder what it feels like to fart along down the street in one of these little buggers next to all those huge heavy cars.

I had a summer job in a Mazda store in 1987 and there were still lots of these around. By 1979 the apex seal problem was solved and the rotary was in fact as reliable as an anvil. I can’t remember a car that as as much fun to drive as a gen 1 RX-7. The motor just zinged to redline, which was so smooth that a warning buzzer had to be fitted to warn the driver.

Like the Talon earlier this week, these cars tended to live hard lives and thus after 1990 or so there were none left, as they had had the bark beaten off them. They were not, however, without their problems.

Until 1985 the Wankel used a 4 bbl carb and setting it up was dealer only with an exhaust gas analyser. The lack of FI made emission control rather problematic and the Wankel needed a rich mixture to prevent detonation and overheating. This meant very high HC emissions, and an extremely complex catalytic converter set up (four if I recall) that was expensive and dangerous to replace. The rich mixture also meant V-8 fuel consumption on the early cars. So much of the car was unique; anti-freeze was injected into the fuel for cold start and there was a manual choke that automatically pulled off. Shade tree mechanics were out of their depths on these cars which made them dealer only. Second owners were mostly youngsters who couldn’t afford to keep the cars up and thus, they went downhill fast once they were traded. Too bad, really, as they were were so fun and unique.

The cars also suffered from a weak electrical system. Mazda never had much in the way of volume and costs had to be cut. These cars hated road salt which didn’t exist in most of Japan. Within five years electrical gremlins were assured.

Still, these things were constant smiles and were in many ways the most fun RX-7 of them all. We used to love getting them out for test drives as they were guaranteed giggles. The 1985 with FI was a much more grown-up car with the larger B-13 engine and more luxury fittings. The price tag had really ballooned by that point, too, and the 1986 car was a quantum leap up in the market. A much better and more sophisticated car but lacking the raw, visceral feeling of the early cars.

A major reason for the rich mixture was that the thermal reactor needed a certain amount of unburnt hydrocarbons to work effectively. It wasn’t as pronounced after 1974 as it was on the earlier emissions-controlled engines, but that was a question of degree.

The rotary’s biggest selling point for automakers in the ’70s was that it had very low NOx emissions, although its HC and CO were higher than a piston engine, necessitating the afterburner. The thermal reactor was a lot cheaper than catalytic converters, so it was considered a worthwhile tradeoff. Eventually, federal emissions laws required the catalytic converter anyway, but as with Honda’s CVCC system, Mazda was able to get away without it for longer.

Even prior to the adoption of EFI, Mazda did a lot of tinkering with the porting, seals, and combustion chamber shape on the 12A and 13B engine over the years, so an additional consideration is that there were a lot of running changes during the production run of some of the cars.

This came out just when I was graduating college. Everyone was salivating! Of course recent college grads couldn’t really afford one, but we could dream! It was ‘our’ 240Z before that animal got bloated…

Regarding it’s sales, keep in mind Mazda produced this gen for 7 years….

A few years ago when I was shopping for a midlife crisis mobile I looked closely at the RX-8, but the internet chatter scared me off…..

I had the 2nd generation RX-7 – a convertible. It had a unique feature; the car could be three different body styles. There was a top down roadster, a top up closed cabriolet and a goofy half up/half down position where the hard front panel was removed to make a landau sort of cruiser. Never did that; it was either all roadster or all coupe for me; just looked too stupid with half the convertible top up.

The car was very well built with lots of nice features. It was an ’88 model year and the first new car I ever bought that had a standard CD. It was slow though and heavy and it had to go for something lighter, faster and more fun. It turned out to be sort of a Japanese Mark or Eldo.

Nice looking cars. I’ve never been in one, but one of the teachers at our middle school, an attractive lady in her 20s, had a beige RX-7 with the same wheels as our featured CC. She was a really nice lady, and while I never had her as a teacher (she was hired a couple years after I was in 5th grade, which is what she taught), but she definitely had the coolest car in the staff parking lot!

I spotted two RX-7s on the same street last year but never got around to writing them up. The white one in the background was a lot more bedraggled than the blue one.

The RX-7 was essentially a successor to the Savanna (RX-3) coupe, and in fact was identified in the Japanese market as the Savanna RX-7. By the latter part of the ’70s, the Savanna/RX-3 was the only rotary Mazda that was selling consistently well and the large majority of those sales were coupes. Part of the reason was that the Savanna had done very well in racing — there was a popular rivalry with the Nissan Skyline GT-R — which made it appealing to younger buyers. Since the Savanna was selling mainly as a sporty coupe, it seemed logical to replace it with a more dedicated sports car pitched at the Fairlady Z.

Toyo Kogyo’s brush with bankruptcy also led to the logical conclusion that the rotary only really made sense for sporty cars and luxury models (and the latter weren’t exported after 1979 or thereabouts), so in most markets, the RX-7 became the only rotary Mazda.

My friends had a gen one that they let me borrow for a business trip from DC to Indy in 1980. What was the point? With Jimmy’s (Carter) 55 mph speed limit, the upper end capability of the car was a moot point. But sitting so close to the rear (live) axle made a ten hour drive in the car a very tiring and painful exercise.

In town the car was simply gutless. These things had no low end torque so you were forced to rev the living shit out of them to get anywhere. So your gas mileage, execrable to begin with, really hit the dumpster if you kept foot on the loud pedal. Fun to drive though.

I toyed with buying one around 1991, to the point where I got the shop manual from the library. These were strange beasties, with 3 barrel carburetors and a tank of glycol “starting fluid” that was injected when cold and had to be periodically refilled.

I’d be fascinated to do a back-to-back comparison of an early RX-7 and something like an Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint Veloce. The twin-cam Alfa four also had decent power with not a lot of torque, particularly in its earlier 1,290cc and 1,570cc versions.

I had one just like that, execpt I had twin red racing stripes on mine (which was not fashionable at the time)
I also had maroon leather interior, a glass sunroof, and no A/C. Driving in hot weather was more sizzle than zing.
Best driving car I ever had, but I became a commuter with a real job, and the RX7 had become a corroded unreliable nuisance by that point..

A dear friend of mine just sold her ’85 model. She bought it new because it was cute and red (seriously), but loved it and maintained it, and drove it for almost 500,000 miles. Finally repair costs/finding someone to work on it became a real hassle (unfortunately I live on another continent) and problems took longer to get fixed. The rotary shop she had used finally became a racing shop and stopped working on ordinary cars. Then came the Scion BB, bought because it could haul gardening supplies better and was certain to be more reliable. So after a frightening (to me) 6 months under a tarp, she washed, gassed up, aired-up and sold her to a young lady who loved to work on cars and wanted something with character. May Miss Scarlett long zing down the road!

I owned an 83 for a couple years when I was in college. Looking back, it was one of my favorite cars: dependable, quick, cheap and it handled great. IMO, these cars are also beautifully designed – the lines are clean and timeless. Later I owned an FC, and it was nice enough but it had lost some of the charm of the 1st gen.

I owned two of these – 81 and 85 both carb’d 12A cars. I honestly didn’t find the low end torque that bad. They don’t have a pile of power but very well balanced and a pile of fun to drive. Much more so than their specs and stats would suggest. I’d say they are a rack and pinion swap and 50hp away from being just about perfect.